history, like an iceber, lies mostly submerged, hidden from our sihgt; only rarely, through some strange upset, does a forgotten portion of it suddenly rise up and give us a glimpse backward through the mists of time. Now such an event has happened at the Yale University Library in New Have, Connecticut.
The story begins, in essence, with the voyages a thousand years ago of nearly mythical men, Icelanders and Grecnlanders led by Lcif Ericson (or Eiriksson), Bjarni Hcrjolfsson, Thorfinn Karlscfni, and other Viking sailors who found new lands far to the west, which they named Helluland, Markland, and Vinlancl. It was Vinlancl that really attracted them, a country rich in grapes, trees, and green-growing things, inhabited by a warlike people they called Skraelings. The heroic: tales the Norsemen told when they came home to Iceland and Greenland were passed from mouth to mouth, and long afterward written down in sagas. Of all this, so historians have long believed, the rest of the then civili/ed medieval world knew almost nothing; Vinlancl, and even Greenland, passed out of the mind of man, and when fresh expeditions set out, led by Bristol sailors, Christopher Columbus, and John Cabot, the ancient landfalls were all forgotten.
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